Invincible Hero

aka: Boring Invincible Hero

Edit Locked

"No one likes to see their favorite heroine killed off, but if she gets away scot-free every time, your fights will quickly lose the element of danger that makes them interesting. The same goes for characters that are essentially invincible."

Advertisement:

Heroes win. It's a general rule of fiction. Sometimes, though, you want the hero to lose a few battles; this is a good way of establishing conflict and drama. A hero may well consistently lose but learn valuable lessons out of it, get Character Development, and grow strong enough to win for the series finale.

And then there are heroes who never lose. Ever. Not only that, but they win handily, especially in life threatening situations. If any "losses" occur, they're typically ambiguous and open ended, brought about by clear cheating on the villain's part, or as a forfeit from the hero due to external causes (kidnapped Love Interest, etc.). This of course tends to rob a given episode or movie franchise of dramatic punch when the viewer's reaction to a hero being lowered into a mortalDeath Trap is "Like You Would Really Do It!" This type of hero is basically a walking personification of Victory Is Boring.

This is practically required if the hero is in some sort of Tournament Arc or else in a situation where any loss would be disastrous (such as if all fights are to the death), as you can't afford to lose even once. Having the character routinely come close to losing, requiring assistance from outside forces, or having the tournament structured so characters can take a loss can help mitigate this.

Examples: Spoilers Ahoy!

Akagi never loses a game of Mahjong in the anime or the manga. However he is reported to have once been beaten by the main character in author Fukumoto's earlier work Ten.

Further, when Akagi loses a round, it's typically because his opponent either got the better of him ("cheating" doesn't really count because Akagi abuses his opponents like a red-headed stepchild when he cheats, which is often) or because Akagi is purposely laying a trap (e.g.: The third game, vs. Urabe).

This is actually addressed in-story in Bamboo Blade. Tamaki Kawazoe, or Tama-chan, is a kendo prodigy capable of defeating adults. One character in the series remarks that he thinks Tama should lose a bout, and not to an adult but to a girl her own age. He feels losing to an equal can teach things that no victory can. Ishida-sensei starts trying to get the team into tougher and tougher bouts in part to give Tama a chance to face others of her own level.

Once she does lose to a superior opponent, she does not know how to handle it at all, having never lost before. Unfortunately, the anime at least ends before it properly tackles the consequences of this, but we're given a fair impression that it is an issue that will be dealt with.

In the manga she handles it a lot better than she does in the anime, quickly getting over it instead of sulking and nearly quitting kendo. She even ends up losing a second match against basically one of the kendo elite, and then her final match with fated rival Ura Sakaki ends without revealing who won.

Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo is invincible. But since the show and character are both crazy, it's played for laughs and not to be taken very seriously. He does have weaknesses and gets hurt a few times, but never seriously enough to matter. Except during the final battle of the original series, but even then he eventually recovers.

Casshern of Casshern Sins, a rare case where it's Played for Drama. Casshern is both immortal and overpowering. He has no choice but to watch everyone around him die, and even when he tries to let someone else win in a fight, it never works out because his berserker mode tends to trigger against his will, leaving an increasing body count on his hands.

A Certain Magical Index: This is one problem that Anti-Hero Accelerator can run into at times: his powers are so unbelievably strong and versatile that there are very few situations that are any threat to him whatsoever, even after he's been De Powered to some extent. Like Alucard of Hellsing, he tends to keep the fans' interest because it is usually very entertaining watching him slaughter all the bad guys, and the focus of his battles is usually on his inner character rather than the carnage he's perpetuating.

Suzaku Kururugi of Code Geass is a perspective flipped version of this trope. He's always able to take down the "bad guys" with his Super PrototypeKnightmare Frame, and always foils Lelouch's plans—but Lelouch is the protagonist. Invoked by the Camelot research team, who name the afore-mentioned Super Prototypethe "Lancelot". Played straight toward the end when he and Lelouch end up on the same side and he effortlessly defeats the most powerful knight in the series, even after he reveals his future-reading superpower.

Fairy Tail has gotten some flak for being one of the series with the most in-your-face examples of The Power of Friendship conquering all. However, a point could genuinely be made for Erza Scarlet during the original manga. To wit...

She was losing against Master Jose (after being weakened from tanking a Wave Motion Gun) before her own Guild Master took over, Jellal manages to paralyze her when her guard is down and shove her into a magic crystal that will kill her, Cobra's snake companion almost lethally poisoned her while she was focused on fighting the owner (and in a later anime-only but still canonical arc she was losing against him until she took advantage of him being distracted by an outside force), fought her Evil Counterpart from an Alternate Universe to a draw (but still claimed the moral victory by convincing her to do a HeelFace Turn), she's unable to hurt Acnologia just like everyone else in Fairy Tail, and she would have lost to Ajeel Raml if not for some timely assistance from Bisca and a BFG, but she's never flat-out lost in a fair fight. The most egregious examples are the Grand Magic Games arc (enters a Mêlée à Trois, one opponent gives her a rare one-sided beatdown before she suddenly overpowers her, gets her right foot shattered saving said opponent from being crushed under falling rubble, the other opponent briefly beats her up while she's weakened before she whips out an armor that essentially makes her literally invincible) and the Tartaros arc (gets tortured badly enough to pass out at least twice, curb-stomps her torturer the second she's freed, quickly defeats the now demonized "other opponent" from the Grand Magic Games, has a rematch with the torturer who subjects her to even worse torture, and still comes out on top). The only opponent who actually truly defeats her (i.e. beats her to the point she can't fight anymore) in a straight-up fight (where she actually had outside help no less) is her own motherIrene Belsersion, who's also a dragon, and even then, it was technically a tie since Irene couldn't bring herself to kill Erza and instead stabbed herself, thus taking her out of the fight too.

Kenshiro in Fist of the North Star is nearly unstoppable. There are very few opponents that ever won a fight against him, or demonstrated superior skill, and he defeats all of them on second attempts, in one case without even having time to recover from the initial mauling. This trope is very prominent in the anime version, as it adds lots and lots of filler Curb Stomp Battles against Punks of the Week, but much less so in the manga.

When Kenshiro loses, he loses badly. Both Souther and Kaioh really did a number on him, his first battle with Raoh was a close call, and his loss to Shin is the moment that sets the entire series in motion.

A good way of characterizing Kenshiro is that since he never technically gets stronger over the course of the series, if he can't beat an opponent it doesn't mean his fists won't work, it just means he's punching them in the wrong way (Souther was a big example of this).

Oddly Justified in Flame of Recca. Recca never loses a fight past a certain (fairly early) point in the series, but then again his powers come from a deal he made with the dragons inside him so if he ever loses anything he'll die. His teammates lose all the time though, especially since much of the series is a team based tournament where they just barely win enough matches to move on every single time.

Similarly, in MÄR (done by the same author) Ginta never loses in the tournament, since if he loses, it's game over. His team mates on the other hand, can and have lost. Some of the rounds come down to a 3-2 win/loss ratios (with Ginta being last fighter to boot).

The witch Dorothy plays this trope straight, however, as she also remains undefeated throughout the tournament. Even though she gets beaten down badly several times, she is able to pull through with sometimes seemingly impossible feats. She does die in the anime, but eventually revives along everyone else for the final battle.

There's a reason Ban and Ginji are called the "Invincible Get Backers", they always succeed in their missions even the one technically for the Big Bad of the mini arc and never lose in a fight unless they are not used to the conditions.

Golgo 13 never fails an assignment, or for that matter misses a shot. If he did, he'd lose his reputation as an assassin and there would be no series. Later chapters solve the problem by focusing more on the people who hire him and how their situations deteriorate to the point that they need to bring in a hitman. (Infamously, he doesn't appear in one story at all; the central character merely uses Golgo 13's reputation as a weapon.) The fact that the stories are standalone and bounce around time help in this regard. For completeness' sake, there have been several occasions of him missing, at least once by weapons sabotage creating a misfire, and one complete miss caused by the target's allegedly psychic bodyguard.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack: Amuro Ray had some narrow scrapes earlier in his career, but by the time of this film he, and his Nu-Gundam, are essentially untouchable. He tears through most enemies as though they didn't exist, and even his archrival, Char Aznable, is only able to stand against him for a few minutes.

One of the biggest problems many Gundam fans had with the ending of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny was that at the end the returning SEED cast had won the final fight without losing a single named character. The greatest loss that the Archangel team suffered was the Justice Gundam's flight pack, and they even went so far as to strike a victory pose at the end to show that they hadn't been scratched. Compare this to every final fight in other Gundam series, including the original Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, in which every character can die and the main character often only gains a narrow victory while his Gundam gets trashed in the process. It also didn't help that this clashed with the promotional art released in advance of the final arc, which showed the Strike Freedom and the Destiny Gundams locked in a bitter struggle, having been torn to shred and reduced to a single weapon each, trying to land a decisive blow on one another.

From Hareluya II Boy, we have Hibino Hareluya, who has yet to even be pushed into being serious during a fight.

Alucard from Hellsing is an immortal Sociopathic Hero, able to survive even near-total bodily destruction. Though whether he's the series' hero is arguable, he receives quite a lot of screen time and plot focus, and few if any situations ever credibly threaten him. Note that Alucard starts off as a Showy Invincible Hero... before even using a fraction of his powers.

It's a Deconstructed Character Archetype, actually. The Major's plan seems to be simply to start a war with London. There's A LOT more to it than that. The point of his plan is to get Alucard down to a form where he's vulnerable enough to finally die. Starting a war and taking London down are pretty much just bonuses. It's also revealed that his sheer invincibility has led to him becoming a bit of a Death Seeker, yearning for a Worthy Opponent to finally kill him (specifically a human, as Alexander trying to discard his humanity to power himself up with Helena's Nail is one of the few things that legitimately angers Alucard, even though it provided one of the toughest fights he'd encountered up to that point.)

Takumi from Initial D starts out like this. In fact, it's the reason why Takumi's dad won't put a new engine in the Eight-Six. He says that Takumi needs to learn what defeat fells like so that he'll appreciate the upgrade. Then again, Takumi has been driving longer than any of his peers, to the point where people think that his car was a ghost. It helps that his dad has been secretly teaching him how to drift since he was 13.

Sibling Tatsuya and Miyuki Shiba of The Irregular at Magic High School are practically Trope Codifier for this, since they are both without any effort, defeat any enemy and stronger than anyone else in the novel universe, so much so that the characters themselves begin to discuss it. And although in the future it gets an explanation, since Miyuki is the perfect Designer Baby, Tatsuya's abilities are still so abnormally powerful that he can instantly calculate the sequence of any spell or even blow up a planet.

The reason for this lies in the fact that the author, by his own admission, prefers long dialogues and intrigues, and not battles, so in the original web-novel, most of the battles were even almost instantaneous.

She loses battles outside of the tournament. And every fight was won after taking a beating first while she figured out her opponent's style and tricks, it was never a Curb-Stomp Battle.

Played with in Legend of Galactic Heroes, with Yang Wenli, who never actually militarily loses anything in which he plays a part, even against incredible odds. Ever. To his allies he's a Hope Bringer, to his enemies he's a Hero Killer, and on both sides he's Famed In-Story. However, his role as the Invincible Hero is subverted often and Played for Drama by Yang himself when he candidly admits that the moment he stops being invincible is also the moment he stops being a hero. By the end we find he's Not So Invincible After All.

Notice that while Yang does win almost any battle as long as he's involved, it's often mentioned and hinted that he'll still lose in some areas. For example, while he nearly kills Reinhard during Battle of Vermillion, Mittermeyer captures Alliance's capital, forcing Yang's fleet to ceasefire. In two other battles he wins over the Empire, capturing back Iserlohn Fortress, but he lost Bucock and Fischer, one being his father figure, and another the "heart" of his fleet. It's even notified that Yang won't stand a chance if Reinhard attacks again after Fischer is killed.

Reinhard, on the other hand, is also considered as Invincible from the beginning of the story to the point that he effectively ends the whole war and unifies the universe half way through the story, but interestingly he'll always feel that his victory isn't complete when Yang is there to disrupt him from getting a total victory. The only real time he gets a crushing defeat is the Battle for the Corridor where he lost two top admirals to Yang's ragtag fleet.

Mahou Sensei Negima! usually averts this (Negi generally loses at least one fight with any villain before he beats them), but the Tournament Arc followed the subtrope of getting to the finals and then losing. Although in that case, the victory was in reaching the finals, and what happened then.

Alternatively, his father Nagi Springfield has been explicitly stated to be completely invincible. Through all the flashbacks, we've yet to see him greatly struggle (with the exception of a tie and a climactic battle against someone by the name of "Lifemaker").

In fact, the Myth Arc of the series concerns Nagi's disappearance ten years prior to the start of the series, and his son's attempts to find out what could possibly have happened to him.

Jack Rakan is also effectively invincible. To the point the only opponents who have ever given him trouble are Nagi (who's more... invincible... or something) and the Lifemaker and Fate. Fate had to rewrite reality in order to have a shot, and Jack is still holding his own.

And when Negi and Rakan finally fought each other in the finals of another Tournament Arcthey both fought each other to a standstill and the fight ended in a draw. And even then, it's still a victory for Negi for reaching Rakan's level.

However, this was only achieved through Rakan, who was still powerful enough to fight which Negi does note, deciding to let it be a draw and the fact that Kotarou got beaten to the inch of his life while stalling time for Negi (it was a tag-team tournament) and helped Negi by briefly halting Rakan from moving so Negi could hit him with an extremely powerful spell.

The Hero in Maoyuu Maou Yuusha is a level 99 Dragon Quest protagonist, and is practically unbeatable in combat. However, this level of power makes him feel apart from humanity. He and the Demon Queen are trying to find a way to save the world peacefully.

Subverted in Mushishi. On the one hand, the protagonist, Ginko, always seems to identify the mushi at work in a particular episode with astonishing speed and accuracy, which would fit this trope; however, this doesn't always guarantee a completely happy ending, as other factors, such as his arriving too late, the patients not following his instructions or there simply being nothing to be done in the first place, frequently get in the way of this.

The trope is also somewhat justified in that Ginko is shown to do a lot of research into mushi in his time, probably more than most others in his trade; however, his young age might count against him in this (particularly in the manga, where he seems barely out his teens; the anime places him more in his late twenties or thirties).

Deconstructed in My Hero Academia, All Might is considered this by the public as he never seems to have lost a fight and considered the "Symbol of Peace" and the man throw down when need be. But most of these feats are what was given to the public to keep the ideal going, in truth by the time of the main story, he was severely weaken following a skirmish with a powerful villain that destroyed most of his body and surgeries could only do so much. Thus he could only turn into his buff form for about 3 hours a day and had to work quickly within that time frame. Still when he finally does fight All-For-One within the series with his depleting power (this time due to the fact that he had given it to Midorya) he gives it his all and manages to come out on top one more time before being forced to retire.

Sora and Shiro, the brother/sister duo from No Game No Life, seem to not only win every game they play, but also have every move of their opponent planned out in advance. However, they do occasionally "tie" when the outcome is still favorable to them.

Noir has its leading ladies usually come out on top, often with ridiculous ease, but considering that they're assassins the other option would end the series. There are a few exceptions, and they do get close a few times: Mirielle nearly dies in the first episode and only survives thanks to Kirika showing up, and Kirika herself gets seriously wounded in an early episode because of a stupid mistake.

Luffy dodges this trope a few times: while he has only ever lost a handful of fights (and is usually unfazed by anything his enemies throw at him) there are a lot of times (such as against Rob Lucci or when breaking into Impel Down) where it is made clear that Luffy wins only by sheer mind numbing determination (and spends a long while near comatose from his injuries). That's not even touching Marineford where Luffy's invincible status was deconstructed.

His fight against Enel (who up to this point has been untouchable) subverts this wonderfully: while Enel is unable to hurt Luffy conventionally (Enel using lightning attacks and Luffy being made of rubber) Luffy can't hurt Enel conventionally either (as Enel can dodge all his attacks) and both must resort to cunning or insane tactics respectively.

Deconstructed in the 4Kids (and only the 4Kids) dub with Kuina. She was the strongest fighter in her father's dojo, being able to beat anyone, regardless of age. However, after beating an adult, the person she defeated was so angry he got his friends to beat her up so she could never fight again. In the other formats, she just fell down the stairs and died anti-climactically.

Deconstructed in One-Punch Man, where the hero, Saitama, is so strong that he defeats all his enemies with just one punch. However, as a result he's growing increasingly detached from humanity and life in general because there are no challenges for him and he's so much stronger than everyone else that he can't seem to relate to them as well anymore. He hasn't even noticed basic things like the entire city area around him being long abandoned.

Additionally, while nothing physical is a challenge for him, he has bad luck in areas he can't punch. He's touchy about his lack of hair. He placed poorly on the Hero Organization's written test, resulting in him being a Class C hero. And partially due to the aforementioned detachment, he's developed a reputation as someone who steals credit for other people's work.

If we count the anime, Ryoma lost in an unofficial match against Genichirou Sanada so badly that he went into an Heroic BSoD. Akutsu has to force him play against him to snap Ryoma out of it.

Early on, he actually reveals that he gets trashed in tennis every day. But he's playing his dad, who is like the strongest player in the world (unofficially).

Revolutionary Girl Utena, Utena, Utena... lost only one duel, and it was because she froze up thanks to Touga's Mind Screw. This is justified early on by gaining the power of Dios in her duels, but it's not even just that. It was basically lampshaded in her first duel with Juri—Juri, the captain of the fencing team nearly does beat Utena because Utena is an amateur. But when she knocks Utena's sword away, it flies up into the air and cuts Juri's own rose, a "miraculous" win against Juri, who had spent the whole time ranting against the impossibility of miracles. In the Black Rose arc Utena's opponents are usually inexperienced and fighting their own issues more than Utena herself, and in the final arc it comes out that Utena wins because her bond with Anthy, the Rose Bride, is much stronger than the screwed-up bonds between her opponents and their "Brides".

This is the exact reason why Seijuro Hiko very rarely appears. According to the creator of the series, he would turn any battle in the series into a joke. Well, no... not so much a "joke" as a really shortone-liner, as any fight would be over in seconds. So, Watsuki keeps him out of normal fights, making him a Showy Invincible Hero instead, with each appearance being a Crowning Moment Of Awesome.

Kenshin himself is this in the first few stories. The series starts out with Easing into the Adventure where Kenshin is much stronger than all of the early villains. Later, the series becomes more serious and darker with villains that pose much more of a threat. Even so, Kenshin almost never actually loses a fight to any of them.

In Saki, the protagonists lose from time to time(for example, Saki and Nodoka when they go against Fujita), but most of the time, not in cases when it would threaten their ability to continue in the tournament.

Lina, the anti-heroine of Slayers, is less of this trope than it warrants, but it is painfully obvious how fellow mages Zelgadis, Amelia, and Sylphiel are out-classed against her, as she is the only person among them (and probably the entire world) who can both beam-spam the most powerful spell in the verse's Black Magic, and can also draw power from the Lord of Nightmares. She also shows ridiculous insight and intelligence often in random bursts, whereas normally she is fairly smart, but not inquisitive - the reverse happens with Zelgadis, who is normally book-smart, but fails at battle strategies. It is her that takes down every single demonic being that the group encounters, which makes Xellos' comment of all four main characters being "Slayers" of demons far less credible - Lina defeated Shabranigdo while the others were taken down in one blow each. Filia, a Golden Dragon, Naga, her alleged rival, and Pokota, a prince, are probably the only people that could rival her, but Filia is a stuck-up, prissy, and naive priestess who often refuses to take part in the group's antics, Naga is incredibly flaky, and Pokota is stuck in the body of a stuffed animal, knocking down his use by a solid margin. This mostly applies to the anime and the novels.

In Sonic X, Sonic the Hedgehog leans into this territory on occasion. He is often presented with a cocky, unphasable Bugs Bunny-esque attitude, treating his often effortless victories against Dr.Eggman as little more than a game.

Kirito of Sword Art Online. He's shown to be ridiculously smart (having built a top-of-the-line custom gaming PC at age 14, knowing how to hack SAO's code, among other things), and is easily considered the best player. He wins every fight with little effort. In fact, one of the only times he's ever lost was when his opponent cheated. There's one scene in particular in which a gang of player-killers rush him. He stands still, completely unfazed while he explains that his health regeneration skill is so high that it refills at a faster rate than his enemies can deal out damage. Later on, he gains a sword skill that is exclusive to him and him alone. Even when his health is depleted to zero, he somehow wills himself back to life to land the finishing blow on Kayaba. It isn't until the end of SAO2 that he actually loses a fight fair and square, and by that point it hardly matters.

Tenchi Muyo: War on Geminar has Kenshi Masaki, a hero whose only weakness is his apprehension of what might happen to him if any of his hundreds of admirers gets him alone. In almost all his fights, he dances around his enemies without the slightest effort; even if it looks like his enemy's actually strong enough to beat him, it turns out he isn't fighting all-out and a single word of encouragement completely turns the battle around. His insane power and endurance is a source of humor in-universe; at one point the headmistress of the school where he's working warns the many people who want to use him that they need to take care not to exhaust him, while behind her he's jogging along with all kinds of massive, heavy material. When she turns around to see him carrying a log roughly five feet in diameter and maybe fifty feet long as if it was a twig, she quietly says "looks like he'll be fine".

Similar to the Golgo 13 example, and the Alucard example, he has reached the level of plot device. The story hinges on the growth and changes of the people surrounding him, and whether it will be a Bittersweet Ending, or a Downer Ending, or a Shoot the Shaggy Dog.

There's a striking case of Early Installment Weirdness in the first novel when D gets briefly distracted by the lighting of a stick of time-bewitching incense that can make a vampire's senses think it's night or day, throwing off his concentration long enough for his opponent Rei-Ginsei to kill him in a straight fight. But then his parasite hand revives him and he's pretty much never threatened again for the rest of the series.

Kazuma Azuma from Yakitate!! Japan is completely stuck in this trope. Despite constantly being sabotaged in the Monaco Cup and being given the "worst possible opponent" over and over again in Yakitate 25, the worst he does is tie, or have his bread judged lower than someone in a different bracket. While he did finally lose to Miki Norihei in a seaweed bread contest, it can be hard to accept it as a true loss since his opponent was basically a real-life person and corporate mascot.

Yugi of Yu-Gi-Oh! has "lost" only five times, and only twice 'fairly.'

To take it a bit further, Yami Yugi (AKA Atem) only lost one legit game in the manga, and that was to Yugi.

Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's: Yusei's "victory" over Team Unicorn through the sheer power of his super-charisma has this trope written all over it. He managed to defeat three duelists, all of whom were skilled and one of whom had defeated two of his own comrades, in a tournament where there would have been no real repercussions if Yusei did lose, and did so due to the leader of said team refusing to exploit a situation where he could have won and that his entire strategy had been building towards. Indeed, this is a recurring theme for Yusei; he has all of two losses in the entire series, and both were more or less framed to downplay the loss as much as possible (a flashback where we only saw the last move, and a match that ended before his opponent could attack).

If there's a #2 moment for testing Yusei's Plot Armor, it would probably be when he activated High And Low, and the top three cards of his Deck happened to have exactly 2700 ATK - any higher or lower, and he would have lost. There's a recurring joke in the fandom that he stacks his cards.

Crow isn't much different - he only suffered two legitimate defeats, both happening over ninety episodes after his introduction, and even those were only managed because his opponents had a massive amount of preparation and help. In both cases, he passed the torch to Yusei, who proceeded to finish them off.

Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL subverts this with Yuma, who has a number of onscreen losses on his record, including several outright humiliations. It's Zig-Zagged, though, as his wins are somewhat Spoiled by the Format - since any loss with a Number user would result in the deuteragonist dying and Yuma's deck being crippled, he never loses to Number users, who happen to make up the vast majority of plot-relevant opponents. Later played straight in ZEXAL II, where pretty much every opponent is a Number user, and he never really loses as a result..

Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V seems ready to subvert this in a similar fashion to ZEXAL, with Yuya initially being treated as mediocre and suffering losses to Yuzu (but only as a consequence of not knowing what he was doing), then Reiji and Jack, who were just better than he was. But after losing narrowly to two major villains who fought him one after the other, he has a perfect onscreen record for the entire rest of the series, and other people tend to treat him as more or less a Messianic Archetype.

Yusaku/Playmaker of Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS never loses a Duel. Not even once so far. The only times he "lost" are against Ryoken/Revolver and Bohman, who forced their respective Duels to end in a Double Knock Out.

Zeorymer takes this about as far as it can go. The machine itself is ridiculously fast and can teleport, plus it's armored enough that it can shrug off nuclear weapons without even being at half power. And the few times it's seriously damaged in the manga, it just teleports in replacement parts from a parallel dimension. It doesn't help that the pilot has an Omniscient Morality License and never gets any real comeuppance for all the crap he pulls.

In fact, the only thing stopping the Zeorymer from owning everything within a 100-mile-radius in two seconds is its pilot being a total wuss until his evil side takes over. So how powerful exactly 'is' this monstrosity? Powerful enough to allow it to single-handedly beat the Super Robot Wars games it appears in ALONE.

Ainz in Overlord is a level 100 MMORPG player character who, along with his similarly leveled NPC minions and guild HQ that was considered one of the hardest dungeons in the game it came from, are all Trapped in Another World. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the circumstances,) even the most legendary of creatures considered leagues above anything any mortal man could hope to challenge are mid-tier at best when compared what was in the MMORPG. It's increasingly shown that the only thing that could actually give Ainz and his henchmen a run for their money is another level 100 player character (none of which have yet appeared in present time,) or one of his direct underlings going rogue which eventually happens when Shalltear is mind-controlled by a World-class item. To get around the protagonist and his party being so overpowered, the plot focuses mostly on Ainz exploring the New World, his political maneuvering among the various nations (both as Overlord Ainz and his adventurer persona Momon that he uses to infiltrate the Adventurer's Guild,) and the far less invincible natives he affects.

I'm a Marvel... and I'm a DC uses this quite well to actually make Superman relatable again. He's constantly lamenting how no one seems to care about him anymore, having moved on to the more fallible and relatable characters in Marvel's comics, and is frozen by self-doubt when Lex Luthor's newest scheme wipes out every other superhero in the world. He's finally able to win with the realization that all of those other heroes are relatable because they're all doing the same thing we all are, trying to be more like Superman. (Made slightly humorous/heartwarming in that it is Stan Lee that points this out to him.)

Also prominent early in Morrison's JLA run where Superman briefly muses that he isn't sure if he lives up to his legend. Pages later he restores the Moon's orbit by giving it magnetic poles. Later still, while he's battling the archangel Azmodel:

The Flash (Wally): This is the man who said he couldn't live up to his legend... he's wrestling an angel.

And all this while the League is dealing with the actual Big Bad. He got Superman out of the way as the writers often have to do in League stories, but gave him cool stuff to do.

How To Write Superman Well is summed-up in one word in the aforementioned angel-wrestling scene:

Speaking of supporting characters, one of the reasons (non-Silver Age) Superman usually isn't described as a Canon Sue is from the focus of the tension being more on danger to other people rather than danger to Superman. While Superman himself is near-invulnerable, saving loads of people at once is usually made extremely difficult, making the readers concerned about the people Superman can't save and its emotional effect on himnote This was used very well in the otherwise forgettable Superman Returns Video Game. Superman himself is, aside from one or two missions, completely invincible - rather, his health meter is the city and its inhabitants, and "survival" is about preventing collateral damage and casualties.

The Adventures of Superman, the 1950s George Reeve television show, is somewhat unusual to modern expectations in largely having a parade of petty mobsters be the villains. The better episodes have there be some tension in the villainous plots; the weaker episodes, well, it turns out those bullets are bouncing off Superman. Again.

At several points, attempts have been made to give Superman weaknesses and vulnerabilities in order to have him being seriously threatened and make him relatable. Kryptonite was the first such attempt, but then writers simply took off with it, inventing literally dozens of forms of kryptonite with each one affecting him differently. It got so bad that some people did the math and calculated that Krypton must have been a planet roughly the size of the entire solar system in order for so many different chunks of it, randomly distributed throughout space by the planet exploding many light years away, to have found their way to earth. Then the idea was put up that if he was cut off from the rays of our yellow sun, then his powers would quickly fade. Okay for awhile, but then it was retconned that his cells all acted as storage batteries, storing sufficient amounts of energy to keep his powers going for quite some time, even if cut off from the sun. Currently, Superman is depicted as being very vulnerable to magic.

Joss Whedon talked about the difficulties of WB putting together a JLA movie versus his own massive success with The Avengers. He pointed out that the Avengers are easier to write and film since they all either have relatable problems or are weak enough to write action scenes for, while comparatively, characters like Superman and Wonder Woman are seen as "gods" without many flaws note despite the fact that one of the Avengers isliterally a god.. Add in other powerhouse characters like Green Lantern and The Flash, and it becomes very difficult to write convincing threats for the group in a cinematic setting.

Much like Superman, Batman is memetically thought of as this. While he suffers several personal losses, in the public's eyes he rarely loses battles. What? He's Crazy-Prepared and a master of the Batman Gambit!

Batman is only invincible half the time. His Crazy-Prepared skills obviously only work in situations he's planned for, so if he meets a new rogue or an old one with a new trick, he will typically lose the initial encounter: the villain will get away scot-free and Batman will get his ass soundly beaten. After escaping and researching the new foe, however, he will always win round two. In fact, the bit about him planning perfectly for every situation is mostly Memetic Mutation - most of his victories in the comics come from going into situations technically outmatched but having enough general knowledge to make up a plan on the spot, and getting general knowledge about the situation often involves not making any headway or being straight up defeated until he finds what he needs to know.

Batman is invincible, but not always victorious. War Games, Under the Red Hood, Death in the Family are costly losses, The Pearl was a costly win, the Killing Joke is a Pyrrhic unresolved.

Batman exemplifies this trope in Justice League of America. He has to, since he wouldn't survive his first mistake against a JLA-class menace.

Somewhat averted in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. The first time Batman fights the leader of the mutants, he gets whomped by the guy. As the series progresses, he gets more and more injured. By the end, he even dies... temporarily.

He lost pretty often in the old days. In fact, almost every episode of the 1960s Batman show had a cliffhanger in the middle where Batman was captured and had to escape a villain's deathtrap.

Asterix is a big offender. Every single battle between Romans (or, really, anyone) and Gauls has the Gauls curb-stomp their opponents, thanks to their magic potion that grants Super Speed, Super Reflexes, Super Strength, and arguably Nigh-Invulnerability. Plus, even in case of a shortage, they have Obelix, who doesn't need to drink any potion since he fell in it during his childhood, and the effect never wore off. As a result, the Romans never, ever, in any comic, manage to gain the smallest durable advantage over the Gauls.

Most plot tension actually comes from Asterix being excessively prudent and avoiding confrontation with Romans troops, even though he and Obelix are more than able to defeat hundreds of Elite Mooks on their own, and have already done so a few times.

When trying to steal Caesar's laurel wreath, Asterix states that the magic potion doesn't protect from being harmed by Roman weapons. Whether it's true or not is unclear, but they never seem to be hurt anyway.

In Asterix and the Cauldron, Asterix and Obelix sign up for some prize fights in order to raise money. However, the Magic Potion makes the fights so one-sided that people quickly lose interest, and the fight promoter runs out of other fighters willing to fight the pair.

The reason Asterix is excessively prudent some of the time, is that there are often non-powered allies or something else that they want to protect, like a barrel of magic potion (in Asterix in Britain) and a direct confrontation would put them or it at peril. Otherwise, plot tension happens only when Asterix loses his flask of potion.

Some of the biggest threats to the Gauls come from things that can't be physically fought anyway, averting this trope. In Asterix and the Roman Agent, everyone in the village turns on each other because of the manipulations of one guy with a knack for causing strife. (The Finnish translation is able to use a handy expression for him, and the album title: "riidankylväjä", literally "sower of discord".) Asterix and the Soothsayer has a similar premise. In The Mansions of the Gods, the Gauls are threatened with commercial and cultural assimilation because of nothing more than an apartment complex built near the village. In the movie The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, the only tasks that give Asterix and Obelix any trouble are a "Leave Your Quest" Test and, especially, a building full of bureaucrats, of which the latter nearly drives them insane.

MAD has a character who is a lampshading of this trope named "Fantabula-man".

These were pretty much Hanks' stock-in-trade, in fact - even his Charles Atlas Superpower characters like "Space" Smith and Big Red McLane were capable of taking on wave after wave of enemies in a fight and winning effortlessly every time (unless the plot demanded they suddenly be struck from behind and captured, and even that would be only a minor inconvenience). At the end, their adversaries would either be swiftly brought to justice or ironically killed in the last few panels, and the comic would abruptly end with the heroes leaving to go elsewhere. From the perspective of an unsophisticated, hard-living guy like Hanks, who abandoned his children at a young age and regularly got into bar brawls in taverns across New York, this was a perfectly sensible way of telling a story.

DC's The Spectre is a bit like this, being nigh-omnipotent (sometimes); much like Hanks' work, as mentioned above, a lot of his older comics focused on the Fates Worse Than Death he'd inflict on his enemies.

Black Panther is another one of these. Indestructible suit with no weaknesses? Check. King of a technologically superior nation with access to whatever gadgets he needs? Check. Makes all martial arts characters look weak in comparison and all smart people look stupid in comparison? Triple check. Wins nearly all fights outside his rogues gallery with ease? Absolutely.

Used tragically in Jason Aaron's run, where the Big Bad's plan actually depended on Logan being invincible, and since Logan is, of course, invincible, he's entirely successful. Logan comes away without a scratch as always, but is more emotionally broken than he's ever been before.

Lampshaded in Robert Kirkman's "Brit" comics. The hero's one power is that he's invincible.

Similarly, Kirkman's character "Invincible", from the same-titled comic, has a main character who's the most powerful person on Earth, because he's the son of that comic universe's answer to Superman (well, sorta). And indeed, he is pretty invincible until his dad beats him nearly to death. While he remains impossible to hurt for most, there're plenty of critters out there more than powerful enough to kill him. Chief among these are the fifty-or-so supervillains that comprise the "viltrumite" species from which Invincible's dad hails, who are effectively-ageless flying bricks with physical powers that increase the longer they exist. The existence of such threats requires Invincible to lend significant focus to things other than straight-up fights, like the ethics of superheroism, the best ways for empowered individuals to improve their civilizations and the choice between preserving traditions that are killing his people and abandoning culture in order to survive (in Thragg's case).

In Lucky Luke, this is very much how Luke evolved in the series... An example of Tropes Are Not Bad: Morris and René Goscinny used this to their advantage by making the villains (especially the Dalton Cousins) the driving force of many stories. The fun is not watching how Luke will win, but how the villains will lose (and, in the Dalton's case, how will Averell and Joe's interactions ultimately doom Joe's plans).

Tintin in the eponymous comic series. Hergé, the author, was so aware of this trope that he grew uninterested in his lead character and began focusing more on sidekick Captain Haddock halfway through the series.

This trope is often held to be one of the reasons X-Man got cancelled. Nate Grey, the title character, was powerful to begin with (which is unsurprising considering his background) but frequently lost fights due to his inexperience and the genetic flaw which made sure that his powers were killing him, leading to frequent instances of Psychic Nosebleed and one of his powers switching off. Even so, he was powerful enough to beat AOA!Apocalypse to a pulp after taking on Holocaust and unconsciously resurrected someone (though it is dubious as to how alive Maddie actually was). Most of the tension came through his Character Development away from being a Living Weapon while trying to figure out his place in this new world and fix his powers. By the end, he'd got his powers fixed and was leaps and bounds ahead of every other telepath and telekinetic in the Marvel Universe, with only planetary or universal scale threats being capable of giving him pause, and treated the multiverse as his personal stepladder. He was killed off in the final issue (sort of), and when he came back some years later, as comic characters are wont to do, after several rounds with the Dark X-Men and Dark Avengers, the writers made note to depower him down to a very limited form of telekinesis and an even more limited form of telepathy.

Herbie Popnecker, a.k.a. The Fat Fury, is this trope taken to its logical extreme. He doesn't look it, but he's quite possibly the most powerful character in all of comicdom. His superpower is mainly "being able to do whatever would be most convenient at the time," whether that be time travel, hypnosis, or walking on air. Note that Herbie is a fat (literally, ball-shaped) nine-year-old with thick eyeglasses and a fondness for lollipops.

Captain Marvel, especially during the Golden Age. With having no discernible limits on his strength, speed and invincibility, and only a handful of short-lived opponents able to challenge him in a fight, most stories were about trying to defeat him psychologically or contriving to trap him before he could change to his super-powered form.

Fables spin-off Jack of Fables plays with this. The eponymous "hero" made himself completely indestructible (Fables gain power based on popularity, and having created three mega-successful blockbusters about his own adventures, he's the most famous and beloved fairy tale character in history), but is virtually a Butt-Monkey in terms of how often he suffers humiliating and/or excruciatingly painful injuries (though his personality means you never have any sympathy for him). His interactions with Gary the Pathetic Fallacy (who is the first of the Literals, the Anthropomorphic Personifications of meta-concepts of story-telling) lead to him being told that having made himself an Invincible Hero, the universe (driven partly by the Theory of Narrative Causality,) now has to provide a balance to it in the form of a never-ending series of fatal injuries and spectacularly bad luck to provide something for his powers to be tested against and prove themselves necessary.

The titular character in Rubine. Rubine is a police detective in Chicago and solve various crimes. You can count the number of times she got hit with one hand during the entire series' run. Her aim practically never fails and she can beat down any crook with ease. The 13th album revealed that the reason why she's so badass is because she had Navy SEAL training and operated as a black-ops in Colombia.

At least to the extent anyone in the series could be considered a "hero"note The series never gave any clue as to the motivations or moralities of the spies, leaving you to choose which one if any to root for, Spy vs. Spy had the Gray Spy: a Femme Fatale who always won no matter what. Unsurprisingly, as she completely destroyed the dynamic of a comic strip where a lot of the fun came from seeing which of the two spies would manage to out-scheme the other, she was almost universally disliked and was phased out rather quickly.

Fan Works

Child of the Storm intentionally sets out to subvert this - sure, Harry, the titular Child of the Storm, is a demigod because of his being the son of Thor, who had incarnated as James Potter as a first run at the whole humility thing. Sure, his mother is a relative of the Grey clan (as in, Jean Grey) and passes on to Harry the psychic abilities associated with that name. Plus, his protection is basically the Phoenix Force/Destruction of the Endless, which his mother merged with. On paper, he's invincible, but the slow development of these abilities in contrast to the rapid increase in the kind of threat his enemies pose, his total inexperience with his abilities, with Daken even succeeding in killing him in chapter 70), the fact that the Phoenix only gets involved if She absolutely has to, and his being a Glass Cannon negate those on-paper advantages, even before one takes into account that he tends to go after people who are even more powerful than he is.

Moreover, the key thrust of the story is that above all, Harry is a young boy who simply wants a family and something approximating a normal life (though he comes to reluctantly accept that part of him enjoys life or death fights). As a result, the primary source of tension and drama is his emotionally adjusting to his dramatically altered circumstances, handling the tremendous amount of stress placed on him by facing numerous murder attempts, losing close friends, and dealing with a lifetime's worth of repressed emotions as he opens up - rage chief among them - the latter two resulting in PTSD. And then there's puberty, which comes with plenty of challenges of its own.

Servo: I've never read any of the books in this series, and I'll bet I know everything there is to know about him already. He's really good at everything that he does, which is everything done by any American of his age and class. Girls admire him, but he only has pure love for one. He's Roger Ramjet played straight. He is, in effect, every bit as annoying as every Mary Sue ever penned.

An amazing subversion comes in the plot of a Touhou doujin Koamakyou by Tohonifun. The protagonist for the games is shown fighting through the bosses of one of the games brutally; violently impaling the first to the ground, angrily mocking the second's attempts to fight, simply ignoring the third, and fighting the fourth and fifth at the same time. At the end of the battle with the fourth and fifth, the fifth stabs her in the back, ignoring the rules of the games... and the protagonist turns around completely unharmed. Turns out, she's pissed off because she completely personifies this trope: as the lead of the series, she can't lose. Ever. In anything. In a world where the best way to pass time is the joy of fighting, and you can never conceivably lose a battle...

Shirou: So it's a choice. Between saving people now and sacrificing people in the future, and sacrificing people now so that people in the future will be safe. Diabel: There is a third possibility. In gamer slang, you could call it the [Nerf Bat]. The rules of the game will beat down the nail that sticks up.

This reputation only grows when the game patches them into [Titled Players], with one of the perks being complete exclusion from the auto-balancing system, as its way of solving the issue.

In a Firefly crossover, Browncoat, Green Eyes, Harry Potter plays this trope straight. He has limits, but they aren't anything that can be exploited by anyone in the Firefly 'verse. Thankfully, he isn't using his powers to kick everyone's ass, it's more of a mystery novel where his powers aren't an instant solution.

The Firefly fanfic Forward deliberately averts this with River. The author has stated that he dislikes fanfics that turn River into a solve-everything "easy button" who casually defeats most enemies, and instead portrays River as a Fragile Speedster and Glass Cannon who has managed to get badly beaten when taking on overwhelming odds. One fight actually ended with River getting shot, her back wrenched, and a leg broken.

Invoked in an interesting way in Akatsuki Kitten: Phoenix Corporation Overhaul. There are eleven characters like this... and all of them work directly for the author. She admits to designing them with God Mode Sues in mind. They are meant to be the most powerful beings possible, so that they can "set the story up" for her to write it. Surprisingly, the characters are still fairly popular when they aren't the Spotlight-Stealing Squad. Even then, the author takes into account complaints about them being shown too often and shunts them out of view in favor of canon for a few chapters.

In The Sweetie Chronicles: Fragments, the Twilight fragment in the maze repeatedly complains about how Sweetie Belle and Blueblood keeps trumping her deadly challenges like they're nothing. Since the duo are trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, they usually spend several loops failing miserably and often get killed in grisly fashions before they work out the solution (and the fragment loves to see that happen) but only they remember it happening, so, to the fragment, it's as though they just walk in and win.

In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Izuku mentions that Firestorm has never lost a battle in his entire career. Firestorm gets to prove why when he wipes out an army of 200 robots single-handedly without sustaining any injuries other than the single knife wound he took while covering for Izuku. Then it gets subverted when he's captured and nearly killed by a robot designed to nullify his powers, only for All Might, a Showy Invincible Hero to the public, to swoop in and save him.

Ash is shaping up like this in The Longest Road. By the time he reaches the Pokémon League, he's able to sweep the floor with the likes of the Elite Four, and has a Legendary Pokémon under his command to freely use. In fact, his only in-story defeat amounts to the fact that he had to re-challenge Sabrina just like in canon, but otherwise, everything goes on his favor.

Films — Live-Action

Kurt Wimmer is an admitted fan of the trope:

Equilibrium:Word of God is that Wimmer made Preston a "god of death" because he always imagined his heroes that way. He doesn't even just mow down hordes of mooks with brutal ease, even other Gun Kata users are no match for him.

Ultraviolet has a similar hero. Violet, a super-powerful "hemophage," can defeat mere humans without any effort. When she is confronted by a mob of fellow superhuman hemophage bad-asses, she cuts every single one of their heads off with a single swing.

A prime example: The main hero of the Japanese movie (and MST3K episode) Prince of Space, whose invincibility depends largely on his ability to repel energy weapons (as well as his ability to choose really pathetic enemies.) "Your weapons are useless against me!" becomes something of a Catchphrase for the hero, who uses it no less than seven times during the course of the movie. Interestingly, this line was added by the English dubbing. In the original Japanese film, the Prince is not invulnerable, which is why he occasionally dodges laser fire.

Any character played by Steven Seagal, who not only destroys all his enemies with insulting and sadistic ease, but most of his movies have at least one scene where a bad guy worriedly describes how much of a badass Seagal's character is. This is all a result of Seagal's input. He says his characters are "born perfect," making them God Mode Sues. One partial exception comes in Executive Decision, when Seagal pulls a Heroic Sacrifice himself after a boarding action goes bad ("partial," because Seagal spent so much time crying in his dressing room about it, that they had to change the scene to make his death "less certain—" despite that he's sucked out of a moving jet at 30,000 feet... without a parachute). Another exception comes from the film Machete (although he plays the villain in that one), where he dies, but still manages to no-sell a machete in the gut for a couple of minutes before finishing himself off.

The title character of Ip ManCurb Stomps all his enemies, but the choreography is tight enough to eliminate boredom. More likely a Showy Invincible Hero. Subverted in the sequel, where the Twister actually knocks him down several times and the final victory is very much hard-won. While Ip mows through everyone else in the first film, the Big Bad, while outclassed by Ip, does manage to hold his own for at least half of the final fight, get in a few licks of his own and comes close to winning by Ring Out a couple of times. Also subverted in the third film, where the only reason Ip's fight against Frank is a draw is due to time limit set up by Frank. Given how the fight was shown, there's a serious possibility of Ip losing if the fight was longer.

Spoofed in Rustlers' Rhapsody, a western-parody starring Tom Berenger. The hero repeatedly lampshades the fact that he's defeated the villains in countless frontier towns without much effort, and always will, because he's the good guy. The villains in this particular town get smart and hire another "good guy" to fight him, presenting him with his first-ever challenge.

'Bone' in Blood and Bone, even more than most of the heroes on this page. The only reason an opponent ever gets in a hit that actually leaves a mark is so he can get patched up by his Sassy Black Woman landlady and give her a Tai Chi lesson. It doesn't matter how many opponents he has, or what weapons they have, he pwns them. At least the other examples lose a fight or at least look like they might at times. Not Bone.

Rocky Balboa has an in-world example. The fight between the nearly 60-year-old Rocky and current champ Mason Dixon is set up because Dixon's undefeated streak is making the sport boring.

Neo of The Matrix grows so strong by the end of the first movie that when he fights three enhanced Agents alone in The Matrix Reloaded, he casually quips "Huh, upgrades" when one of them blocks an attack. The only bad guy who is capable of taking him on equal terms is Smith with a powerful copy of himself that's absorbed the Oracle's powers.

The Adventures of Captain Marvel has the title character being the only person with superpowers in the serial, and being Nigh Invulnerable to boot. Surprisingly however, this trope is averted, despite Captain Marvel being immune to bullets, blades and other common types of attacks. Throughout the serial, sufficiently advanced technology is shown to be able to harm him enough to knock him out, and he's placed in situations where its stated that even his invulnerability might not be enough to protect him, such as a death trap involving molten lava. The serial also came out when the character's comic series was fairly young, and he had yet to become quite as invincible as he would be eventually.

Captain Amazing in Mystery Men is introduced with a long history of this due to his perfect win record. World-class super powers, a wealthy Secret Identity, photogenic charisma, and the connections to arrange release of his nemesis in order to keep merchandise interest up.

Captain Marvel, much like her comic-book counterpart, is immensely powerful, and the only reason she doesn't curbstomp her opponents in her solo movie is that she's carrying a power limiter. Once that is removed there ceases to be any meaningful threat to her, to the point where in Avengers: Endgame she goes toe to toe with Thanos wielding the Infinity Gauntlet, and is only defeated through a Power Stone sucker punch.

This was one of the criticisms of The Chronicles of Riddick. In Pitch Black, Riddick was a lot more human but in the sequel, Riddick is suddenly turned into the smartest, strongest, and most skilled person in the movie. Not a single opponent lands a clean hit on him until his climactic fight with the Big Bad. For a comparison, in Pitch Black Johns was able to effortlessly subdue Riddick with nothing more than a baton.

In The Warrior's Way, the hero Yang defeats every enemy with a single swing, never getting so much as a scratch. In the very beginning, he defeats the "best swordsman in the world... ever" effortlessly.

Selene from Underworld (2003) is this in spades, starting out as invincible to begin with and even being more powerful than her boyfriend, who was supposed to be the most powerful creature of all time once he became a hybrid, and ends up being little more than her attack dog. Then it snowballs from there when she gets an upgrade in the second film and is made immune to sunlight and possibly to all other vampire weaknesses. In the fourth film this is taken to ridiculous levels and her daughter is just as bad. By the fourth film Vampires pretty much consider her a God. What makes it worse is that in the Underworld series the older you are, the more powerful you are. Despite what should be a massive gap in power, she succeeds in killing The FIRST VAMPIRE in the second film, who himself became a hybrid and as such should be able to beat down everyone in the cast with ease. She never takes more than one-two hits per film (and even then only because the plot demands that she has to in order to keep the movie from more or less dying midway through) and even then just shrugs them off like they were nothing.

Machete in Machete, due to outclassing everyone else in sheer badassitude, which even gets invoked at the end. Torrez has defeated Machete in a knife duel and is about to kill him, which Luz notes will happen if they don't interfere. Sartara counters her by noting that Machete simply can't lose purely because he's Machete, and Luz says she's got a point. Then Machete suddenly gets up and impales Torrez.

Jet Li in Kiss of the Dragon. He can clear out a building full of Corrupt Cops and a room full of black belts and make it look easy. In Fearless (2006) he can defeat the world's best fighters in successive bouts despite each having a different discipline like boxing, spears and fencing, and even when fatally poisoned he still easily defeats his final Japanese opponent.

Happens gradually in Lucy. The protagonist starts out as naive and helpless, but gains powers that allow full control over her own body, then to anticipate and out-think her opponents, and eventually allow her to control matter and time.

X-Men: Days of Future Past: Quicksilver busts Magneto out of the Pentagon single-handedly. No one else needs to be there. (For instance, Beast uses a tech thing to mess up the cameras, but Quicksilver is so fast that he's invisible to cameras, so it doesn't matter.) The kitchen scene in particular made it obvious that this is all just a game to him, and there's really no chance of failure. He could easily solve the entire plot by himself, which is probably why the writers jettisoned him after the Pentagon scene. This is probably why Apocalypse utterly wrecks him when they fight in X-Men: Apocalypse.

In Megaforce, the titular Megaforce is a private army "whose weapons are the most powerful science can devise": motorcycles that shoot missiles, dune buggies with lasers, and a hologram of a woman in a bikini. In the climax, Megaforce's only possible escape route is being guarded by a company of tanks on flat ground with a clear firing range. Megaforce's brilliant strategy is to just drive straight at the tanks in broad daylight. No one on Megaforce is killed or injured doing this, and even the guy who misses the plane taking off gets away because his motorcycle can fly.

This is an accusation often leveled at the Die Hard sequels. John McClane started off the first film as an aversion of this trope, a hero who gets hurt like anyone else would. By the time of A Good Day to Die Hard, he's able to brush off falling through several stories of glass despite pushing 60.

Eggsy from Kingsman: The Secret Service borders on this: By the end of the film the only things that have really posed a challenge to him were killing his dog and fighting Gazelle, almost an Invincible Villain in her own right; everything else he aced with flying colors and, of the two exceptions, one ended up not deterring him and the other he succeeded, albeit with a lucky shot. Not bad for a street punk with at best a year's worth of formal training.

G-Girl from My Super Ex-Girlfriend is a Superman-style Flying Brick in an otherwise entirely mundane-seeming world that is no different from our own, and is thus basically unbeatable. Her archenemy (who, up until that point was only any kind of threat to her at all because he knew her secret identity) does manage to find a way to rob her of her powers, but It Only Works Once and he ends up botching it.

When it comes to fights, any character played by Bruce Lee generally overpowers his opponents with ease. His enemies rarely truly endanger him and the strongest of them end up as Curb Stomp Cushion at best.

Aside from her initial training, Diana in Wonder Woman (2017) is untouchable throughout the whole movie. She dispatches mooks by the dozen, she tanks heavy machine-gun fire, she strolls through deadly gas... the only opponent who manages to give her a decent challenge is the God of War himself. Even his apparent victory over her is merely a brief setback; it only serves to fully awaken her power.

The eponymous "hero" of the Deathstalker Series, at least in the original film. Deathstalker was a bland Conan the Barbarian knockoff, with a magic sword that made him literally invincible, as long as he held it. The subsequent sequels toned this down massively, retooling Deathstalker as more of a Lovable Rogue type.

Roland, from The Song of Roland. Although he has to die in order to be the Doomed Moral Victor (and because the actual Roland died in that battle), most of his wounds are somewhat self-inflicted things, like when his temples explode because he's blowing so damn hard on that horn in order to warn Charlemagne's army. Also he keeps fighting even when his brains are running out his ears and onto his army.

Pick a pulp novel hero. Any pulp novel hero from the 1930s whether it be Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, John Carter of Mars, Tarzan, or especially, Doc Savage. They will be far superior to any other human (even those of their own group), irresistibly attractive to females, and the best warrior that ever lived, requiring dozens of other warriors to even stand a chance; and usually a brilliant intellectual. Some writers knew this might be boring so they toned down one of these aspects or got rid of it all together. Other times they were able to make the rest of the story interesting enough that it didn't matter.

John Carter, at least, is occasionally shown as having some doubts about his ability to get out of his latest scrap... though to return to the "invincible" theme, often he's not actually worried about losing, he's just concerned that he may not be able to win fast enough to prevent some other event that's happening at the same time (often, Dejah Thoris being kidnapped). If it's less than 90% of the way through the book, he probably won't win fast enough.

Agent Pendergast: Aloysius Pendergast, at least in the book Brimstone, is the very essence of this trope. Subverted in the later books. It's true that Pendergast never loses when he's on the offensive, but cracks and fails badly when he himself, and those he loves and protects, are the ones attacked. The price of Pendergast's intensive training and discipline to obtain his badass abilities is also explored in depth.

Berserker's Planet features a gladiatorial tournament. One of the contestants claims that he 'has never met a man who could stand against him'. Subverted in that, as one of the more intelligent contestants points out, this being the culmination of a series of to-the-death duels that's true for all the survivors; even those that got killed in the previous rounds must have been undefeated up to that point.

In Corpies, Titan is rightly called the strongest man in the world by his merchandise. However, when Hexcellent asks about it, he points out that he is the physically strongest man but by far not the most powerful Super in the world. However, he does have decades of experience as a Hero fighting criminal Supers, not to mention the HCP Training from Hell that every Hero must go through to be licensed. He's got plenty of tricks up his sleeve for when fists aren't enough. During a fair, his team participates in a tug-of-war contest with others. However, Titan realized very quickly that the crowd almost never cheers for them because everyone knows that he'll inevitably win without even trying. So he tells his teammates that he's not going to participate anymore. They argue that they'll lose. He says that they might, but they'll win the support of the crowd for doing their damned best. Indeed, that is what ends up happening. Their boss Mr. Greene is annoyed at the loss but is happy about the PR. Fortunately for the readers, the main challenge of the story is such that even Titan is tested, providing for plenty of excitement.

Matthew Sobol's Daemon from Daniel Suarez' books skirts this trope closely in the first book because of the incredibly complicated Gambit Roulette Sobol puts into place that apparently comes off without a hitch. It's justified by the fact that Sobol put lots and lots of redundancy and backup plans into the system, but that shifts the Invincible Hero status to Sobol. Although he is an Invincible Villain in this case. Or is he? The sequel Freedom(tm) ramps up the action to put serious question into the Invincible part as well.

The Dark Tower: Roland is The Ace and never challenged by any of his opponents with a gun in his hand. King apparently tried to regulate this by removing some of the fingers on one of his hands, but only using one gun doesn't seem to slow him down at all.

Deacon Chalk of the book Blood and Bullets. He has more preparedness than Batman and can slay vampires better than Buffy and Blade combined even though he is a completely vanilla human. He also apparently lives in the same world as the Winchester boys and Anita Blake, despite them being completely different continuums. It reads like not so good fanfiction despite the fact that it's a published novel.

The City Watch becomes so large, powerful and influential - many of its personnel are serious badasses in their own right - that very few plausible threats are much of a threat to it anymore. Noticeably since Jingo most storylines have involved either actual wars or separating Sam Vimes and the other main characters from their vast resources via distance (Snuff) or time (Night Watch) with the bulk of the Watch functioning as The Cavalry. The author himself noted this problem = any story set in Ankh-Morpork later in the series would by default rapidly become a "Watch" book if he wasn't careful and deliberately created the Moist von Lipwig character as a way of setting stories in the city with a protagonist who wanted nothing to do with the Watch.

In Snuff, Sam Vimes himself has become this, in the eyes of many long-time Discworld fans. In the course of the book, he is never once seriously tested or takes a wrong turn, he has all life's problems sorted out.

In the Discworld series as a whole, Vetinari's plans never fail. Never. If Vetinari is involved with the main character of the book in some way, their schemes will turn out successful (even if not in the way the main character expects).

By the grace of God, nothing in Hell can kill or even injure the protagonists of The Divine Comedy so long as they remain faithful. This spiritual invincibility applies to all loyal to God, which allows a saint like Beatrice to stroll into Hell without fear.

Ender Wiggin from Ender's Game gets effectively banished from Earth for being one of these, since everyone is rightly terrified that if he decides to take over the world, no one would be able to do a damn thing to stop him. This only means that his sociopathic brother Peter takes over instead (creating a golden age of peace and unity). To be fair, it's less because he's invincible and more because he's got such a good reputation as Earth's savior that any cause he fights for will automatically gain the support it needs.

"It doesn't matter how bad they stack the odds, if you're on the other side no fight will ever be fair."

Any book by Raymond E. Feist, of Krondor fame. While the characters have their fair share of misery, the definition of such people as Jimmy the Hand, Mara Acoma, and Roo Avery is that they always succeed at everything they put their minds to.

This seems present in Harry Potter, but only so far as Quidditch goes. The Gryffindor team is the "good" team which never loses so long as Harry is playing — the only losses he experiences are ones where he's knocked out or isn't playing at all, because Harry's quidditch skill is so good that no one else can ever rightfully win against him. It's also played straight in that the Slytherins, in Harry's view at least (and most other characters as well, it seems, like Luna, Lee, etc.) seem to cheat gratuitously in every match against Gryffindor, because there is no possible way that any team (including Slytherin) could win against Harry's Gryffindor if they played fairly. While this trope doesn't extend to the rest of the Harry Potter series, this is one example where it seems to hold true every time.

Honor Harrington plays with this trope. In earlier novels the ultimate victories are Honor's. She wins at great costs to her crew and ship, but always does the major turning in the end. However, as Haven becomes better characterized, she often just survives Pyrrhic Victories. Until she ultimately spends a year in a POW camp.

Any protagonist from a James Byron Huggins novel. All of them (with the exception of Longinus in Nightbringer) are Badass Normals who no matter what they are facing — superhuman nephilim (Nightbringer), a genetically-engineered government-built dragon (Leviathan), squads of highly-trained Mooks (The Reckoning), prehistoric Hulk analogs (Hunter), or an ancient Egyptian sorcerer (Sorcerer) — they will always contemptuously beat them.

Roran from Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle is the perfect example of this trope. Despite being a farm boy at the start of the series, and never once going through any kind of training (in either tactics or combat), he picks up a hammer in the second book and becomes an instant He-man who is able to defeat almost 200 men by himself in a single confrontation. He never once loses a fight and his daring military plans eventually culminate in him winning the entire war for the rebels, again despite a complete lack of any kind of battle experience whatsoever.

Feric Jaggar, hero of The Iron Dream, never loses at anything, ever. The pace of the plot is determined primarily by how fast he can swing the "Steel Commander". This is intentional; it's part of the book's Stylistic Suck.

Subverted in The Most Popular Book in the World, a Twilight parody. The author killed off certain characters whose counterparts in Twilight do not die (including Candy and Hector 2.0) because she found it unrealistic in the original books that vicious battles are fought against the Volturi and yet no one on the heroes' side is killed.

Peekay, the main character of The Power of One, doesn't lose a single boxing match in the entire book. He does Handwave this at one point by noting that with such a wide range of opponents in South Africa, it wasn't unusual for someone to go 40-0 at the Junior level, but he's also something of a Determinator anyway.

Not a person, but a whole organization: The Service in James Blish's The Quincunx of Time. As the prologue points out:

The press was free... Yet there had been nothing to report but that: (a) an armada of staggering size had erupted with no real warning from the Black Horse Nebula; and (b) the Service had been ready.note With three times as many ships as the enemy armada, perfectly positioned to enfilade it as soon as it broke from cover.By now, it was commonplace that the Service was always ready. It had not had a defect or a failure in well over two centuries.

Richard Rahl from The Sword of Truth flirts with this trope. Every book, he spends his time working himself into a more and more impossible situation, only to casually brush it aside at the climax.

Sarah in Tales of an Mazing Girl isn't completely invulnerable - but notably she acts that way with a cool, calm demeanor that is never frightened of the Monsters, ninjas, or Star Trek Cosplayers masquerading as ninjas she faces.

The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign: Kyousuke almost always wins his battles and manages to save everyone. While he might be at the disadvantage the first time he encounters a villain, by the second fight he's figured out a way to counter their strategy and defeat them. He can even defeat groups of soldiers in Powered Armor without summoning. There are two exceptions to this, however. Kyousuke never manages to defeat Elvast, even in the rematch. While he technically does figure out ways to stop the White Queen's plans, this is only possible because she's Yandere for him and considers it fun to let him win.

At a panel discussion/writer's workshop summarized here, Timothy Zahn, writer of The Thrawn Trilogy, called this trope "Superman Syndrome", where characters were so powerful that there were few challenges for them; he mentioned that a lot of Expanded Universe writers have done that with the Jedi, elevating their powers so far beyond what we saw in the movies. He considers it boring, because who could ever really challenge or defeat such characters? Characters had to genuinely surmount whatever difficulties that might create, not use a deus ex machina to escape.

An excellent example of his addressing this, specifically with respect to Star Wars, can be seen in the Hand of Thrawn duology, with Luke Skywalker finally learning a lesson that it took him from all the way back in The Empire Strikes Back (when he rushed off headlong to save his friends) to learn: the Force can guide a Jedi's actions, if they let it. He needed to let go of the torrent of raw power to hear, essentially, the wisdom of the Force. In doing so, he had to trust that his friends and family could handle themselves without him, as he knew they could, and to trust in his own abilities and his own path (the specific catalyst being to head to the one place where he saw a vision of himself, not just of others). It worked out pretty damn well. (This was promptly discarded by future writers, who went back to the style of superweapons and insane power for good and evil alike.)

This is subverted in Knights of the Old Republic. If you talk to Jolee Bindo, he will tell you about his friend with great Destiny, Andor Vex. He was monumentally strong in the Force, and was prophesied to have a great destiny, which would change the face of the galaxy for centuries. He was captured by a marauding Warlord, and when approached, decided to rely on his reputation and perceived importance to history. This pissed off the warlord, who threw him down a reactor core ventilation shaft. His body hit something sensitive, causing the ship to be destroyed, along with the warlord, freeing the sector from his iron grip. So... yeah, destiny! To make it even better, Jolee Bindo does not relate the story as a piece of somber wisdom but as a hilarious anecdote, laughing the entire time he's telling it. He already knows what the PC's "great destiny" that everyone keeps alluding to is as well, he just likes openly messing with people.

This is explicitly discussed in Boston Legal's usual Meta way, when Alan gets worried that the lawyers of their firm are winning too much, making their cases less exciting.

Michael Westen in the early seasons of Burn Notice, at least in regards to his non-spy Villains Of The Week. His skills and resourcefulness so vastly outclass his opponents that there simply is no dramatic tension. It's a measure of Mike's usual invincibility that the most effective scene in the series showed him nearly whimpering in the face of one more, notably galling injustice. Michael's more serious opponents put up a better fight, and "beat" him several times. In later seasons, Michael is less invincible, as his plans often hit a major bump halfway through (often because the client does something stupid) that leaves him racing to regain control of the situation. Michael's invincibility was lampshadedhilariously by a member of a Russian assassination squad in Season 4's "Past and Future Tense"

After his first season (in which he was a very flawed and fallible hero doing his best in difficult circumstances), the Third Doctor's era had tendency to fall into this. Jon Pertwee liked to play the Doctor as being always in control and one step ahead, and as time wore on in the era the Brigadier devolved from a powerful and pragmatic figure the Doctor struggled to influence to a comedy incompetent the Doctor could easily overrule. Being the Doctor, he was smarter than everyone around him, and being the moral centre of the show, he was always right about everything. When Philip Hinchcliffe took over the producer role and Tom Baker the mantle of the Doctor, both liked the idea of making the Doctor a more distant and fearful figure who would face physical and emotional pain and make the occasional poor decision.

A common criticism of the Graham Williams era is that the Fourth Doctor ends up as one of these. The preceding era (produced by Philip Hinchcliffe) would often play Break the Badass with him by forcing him to struggle through his fear or physical pain, or having him paralysed by indecision and get squeamish about Shooting The Dog, or even letting him get Mind Raped or beaten up, so the powerful character of the Doctor and Tom Baker's charismatic performance would have something to overcome. But, by the Williams era, he's physically strong enough to best people in a straight up fight, has all sorts of amazing Time Lord powers that get him out of scrapes, he can charm his way into making anyone love him or act his way into making anyone hate him, is so clever that he can solve the mysteries in his head and needs no-one else's help, and he does it all with a winning smile to the camera. His odd and difficult personality keeps him entertainingly flawed and he does some great character-based and slapstick comedy in these seasons, but it's almost never used to create in-story tension. The very first story of the JNT era signalled a big backlash from this by making the Doctor both physically and emotionally vulnerable in a way obvious in promotional pictures; later, the same producer oversaw the Doctor's regeneration into a younger and more subtle character defined by his flaws and vulnerabilities.

Subverted by Farscape - the heroes are all on the losing side all the time. Even their wins can't be considered as wins, more of a just-barely-managed-to-stay-alive-one-more-day situation. It's so bad that you might actually get pissed at the show for constantly making them lose.

Subverted with Peter Petrelli and Hiro Nakamura in Heroes. Peter could gain any other superhero's ability simply by standing near them. Hiro could stop time, teleport, and travel through time, making him nearly impossible to defeat in battle. However, the problem with these heroes was that they were given too many opportunities to solve all the problems of the plot too quickly. This meant that they had to clutch an Idiot Ball in order to keep the plot moving, leading to many Kill Him Already! moments among fans. Even the writers realized this and had both characters significantly weakened for a time.

Souji Tendou, the titular Kamen Rider Kabuto. He effortlessly defeats every single challenge that comes his way, and any exceptions are either Played for Laughs (such as his obsession with winning a scratchcard game) or because he let the other person win. It got so bad that the show had to introduce an Evil Twin just to give him an adequate challenge, and with that it only took a few episodes for him to overcome it. Of course, his awareness of his utter invincibility is one of the aspects of Tendou's character. Kamen Rider Kiva, on the other hand... has no real excuse once he gets Emperor Form.

Sportacus from Lazytown. He has no character flaws, never fails at anything he tries and is hero-worshiped by everyone (except Robbie Rotten). The only thing that keeps him from being a Mary Sue is that he's as naive as everyone else in the show (except, again, Robbie) to the point where it becomes Adorkable.

Eliot Spencer in Leverage. As the group's muscle, he is unstoppable. The bar for his abilities was set high in the show's pilot, as he enters a room full of armed mobsters and defeats them all in a matter of seconds. From this point on, anyone he faces is doomed. The fact that he works completely unarmed only adds to this trope. Subverted slightly with the introduction of Eliot's Evil CounterpartQuinn - who we find is actually Not So Different (he easily fights at Eliot's level) to the point that the team calls him in as Eliot's substitute when they find themselves in an Enemy Mine situation.

MacGyver. Earlier seasons were still able to portray him as fairly interesting in spite of his contractual invincibility (if often through Diabolus ex Machina), but after the writers finished turning him into a full-fledged Fixer Sue, it got to a point where it was almost subversive to not have an improvised gadget work to full effect (it would still remedy the situation regardless...).

Patrick Jane from The Mentalist fits this archetype very well. It doesn't matter what manner of outlandish or dickish moves or claims he pulls, he will always be justified in doing them, even if there would be no reason to do so beforehand. He always wins. A fine example of this is the fourth season premiere, where he manages to drum up a million dollars by himself for bail, while in jail, and manages to get away with murdering a man who had never been investigated prior, by convincing the jury that the man was his arch-nemesis, when in reality he wasn't.

Parodied in a sketch of That Mitchell and Webb Look, in which a hero who can summon an army of angels teams up with a hero who can ride a BMX bike really well. The BMX hero keeps suggesting clever ways to fight the villains with his BMX bike, but the other hero keeps pointing out that simply summoning an army of angels would solve all their problems.

Shawn Spencer in Psych; others might one up him once or twice an episode but it's always Shawn (except maybe for A Day in the Limelight episodes) who makes the final break and solves the case. He's so damn smug about it, you find yourself wishing he'd lose in his own arena at least once.

Has come close to killing Survivor a few times. Often, one tribe comes into the merge so down on numbers that the members only have a shot at winning if the other tribe breaks. More recent seasons have added extra means of immunity to counteract this. Boston Rob Mariano in particular has overtaken Russell Hantz as the Creator's Pet, and getting his own Survivor season to himself with the dumbest cast since Samoa. And given that the players in Samoa made stupid move after stupid move, that's saying a lot!

Xena: Warrior Princess: Xena, while supposedly a regular mortal (questions about her true father aside), is pretty much unbeatable. She has defeated entire armies on her own along with war gods, archangels, and demons in direct battle despite their vastly superior strength. Any time she meets an enemy she cannot directly defeat she either acquires new powers, skills, or weapons that allow her to triumph or her enemies conveniently forget about the powers that would let them easily defeat a mortal.

Mr. Monk is darn near invincible. On the extremely rare occasion that he's unable to figure out a crime, or if the perp is able to get away because he can't put things together fast enough (or in one case because of a slick lawyer), it darn near destroys him. So much so that he tries to leave the detective business for good. His inability to solve Trudi's murder is one of the biggest anchors holding him down. When he finally solves it in the series finale, a lot of his problems start to grew less severe.

Brendan in series 3 made it to the final having been pretty much perfect in every week, only not being Star Baker every week due to moments of genius from the other contestants (James in particular). His safe but efficient style wasn't enough in the final, but his being there was almost guaranteed from the start.

Arguably Ruth, the runner-up of series 1, who was so calm and composed, she would often finish ahead of time while everyone else was rushing to meet the deadline.

And perhaps series 4 finalist Kimberley as well, who showed few weaknesses in the contest but ended up on the wrong side of a Technician vs. Performer battle with Frances.

Series 6's Ian rarely messed up and managed to win Star Baker three times in a row. He ultimately didn't win in the final, however.

Both series 8's Sophie and Steven fit this to different degrees; the latter won Star Baker three times (including the first two weeks) and only came close to elimination in the semi final (leading many to claim he was a plant), whereas the former was always somewhere between the middle and top and never really lost her calm. It was obvious from the first two episodes that they'd be finalists, the only question being who'd join them.

Wonder Woman: Thanks to Executive Meddling, Wonder Woman's opponents generally were physically overwhelmed. The producers in the 1970's were very worried about the vision of a woman being hit by a man on prime time television so they generally didn't allow it. The result was an even more invincible heroine than she was in the comics.

Music

Hjältekväde ("Hero's song") is a popular song at Swedish SCA gatherings, about the noble duke Caspian (no relation to the Narnia guy) who leads his army to fight the enemy. Except he dies in the seventh verse from a stray arrow. But since the song is (jokingly intended to be) commissioned by "the duke" (maybe a successor or relative, maybe Caspian himself), the songwriter amends this by having a goose land on his head and take the arrow. As the song continues, the hero gets killed in several un-heroic but fairly realistic ways (he gets stabbed by a spearman from behind, crushed by a panicking horse, and butchered by the more skilled enemy leader) and hastily saved by various contrivances (he's carrying a sack of potatoes on his back for explicitly no reason at all, the horse falls in love with a passing moose, and he wins the duel with no description at all). The song continues to sing about how dull it is to have the hero win all the time and never let him even take a scratch, but assures the listeners that when real nobles go out to fight, they're just as vulnerable as anyone else...

Although not necessarily heroes, GWAR has battled forces that have threatened mankind and they've come out on top each time.

Lampshaded and parodied by Blues Traveler in their song "Run-Around": "Like a bad play where the heroes are right/And nobody thinks or expects too much/Hollywood's callin' for the movie rights/Sayin' hey babe, let's keep in touch"

Myths & Religion

In most monotheistic religions, God is an omnipotent, invincible being who can do anything.

One of the calling cards of Catholicism is a larger focus on the Virgin Mary. It has been speculated that the reason is simple: many practitioners can relate more to the Virgin Mary than Jesus or God because of this trope.

Any match between a main eventer (face or heel) and someone lower down the card involving a potential world title change will inevitably involve this. Even if the lower-carder does manage to win, it's usually the result of a disqualification or countout (on which the title cannot change hands); if not, it's a non-title match, often for the lower-carder to "earn" a title shot. Like you would REALLY have Shelton Benjamin win the world title.

Among the members of the newly formed NWA, Lou Thesz was considered the Trope Maker. One of the selling points that managed to unite the territories of the 1940s was that each would have a say in who held the World Titles, but Thesz worked behind the scenes to ensure that the man with the World Heavyweight Title was him.

Concerning The Big Three of Lucha Libre, El Santo reached his status by connecting with the audience in ways he did not even fully understand, The Blue Demon rose to the top through sheer force of talent, being the best regarded among Santo's many rivals, and Mil Mascaras became a legend pretty much by not losing, ever. In Lucha Libre Internacional and The Universal Wrestling Association, the aforementioned Thesz was succeeded by El Canek, but not even he could beat Mil Mascaras.

Both members of BI Cannon, Giant Baba and Antonio Inoki, were viewed as talented wrestlers, but Baba was believed to be the better booker and a much better promoter. Baba's All Japan Pro Wrestling often dominated Inoki's New Japan Pro-Wrestling, until the NOAH exodus anyway, but as a wrestler Inoki was a much bigger star than Baba and is the most popular pro wrestler in Japan of all time after Rikidozan, mainly because Inoki always won, and usually in decisive fashion.

Most of WWE's main event faces seem to have this aura of invincibility around them. Hulk Hogan will lose cleanly once in a blue moon. Hulk Hogan's a fairly interesting example here, as that same aura of invincibility that made him a god in the WWF bored WCW fans to tears (well, that, and the horrible storylines and god-awful gimmicks that surrounded him). Then they turned him heel, and he became more popular than he was since he left WWF. Then he greatly outstayed his welcome and the problems started again, only as an Invincible Villain.

The Ultimate Warrior is the poster child of an "Invincible Hero." The Ultimate Warrior possessed an arsenal that consisted of clotheslines and shoulder blocks. He managed to beat the Honky Tonk Man in 31 seconds for the IC belt at SummerSlam 88, beat Hulk Hogan for the WWE World Heavyweight Title at WrestleMania VI in 1990, and generally never lost a match unless severe interference was involved. He was eventually fired for extorting Vince McMahon for more money, only to be eventually rehired by Vince and make a return at WrestleMania XII. He capped off his career in the WWF by completely no-selling Triple H's Pedigree and remaining undefeated until he was fired again.

In WWC, La Tigresa after a HeelFace Turn; her third WWC Women's Title run was from April 17th 1993 to February 25th 1998 when she had to vacate the belt due to an arrest.

The ultimate professional wrestling example of this trope is Goldberg. He had a winning streak of 173 after his WCW debut, finally broken by Kevin Nash after Scott Hall shocked him with a taser. Although this is an example of Tropes Are Tools; many, many fans didn't consider the streak boring at all. Goldberg could still get outwitted by other wrestlers though. And Bret Hart beat Goldberg several times after the streak was broken. And Goldberg lost some of his invincibility once he joined WWE.

Triple H gets a lot of this, to the extent that reviewer guidelines for Smackdown vs. RAW '09 explicitly forbade showing him in a "prone or defenseless position". Guess how that one went.

Subverted by Pro Wrestling NOAH in the case of heavyweight champion Jun Akiyama vs. challenger Masao Inoue, a perennial heel midcarder who'd unexpectedly won a contender's tournament... since his inevitable doom was so "obvious" — Inoue could neither overpower, outsmart, nor out-wrestle Akiyama — that the match began with him immediately using his signature moves at the beginning and became a race to see if he could outheel his opponent in time, Inoue's "tricky" cheating heel ways against Akiyama's heel brutality...

The Briscoe Bros get accused of this a lot in relation to Ring of Honor and Full Impact Pro's Tag Team divisions, especially after their HeelFace Turn. Where it took over a decade for there to emerge a three time holder of any other belt the team had already held the ROH tag team belts eight times. Even when the Kings Of Wrestling managed to surpass the Briscoes as the longest running tag team champions Mark and Jay proved able to reliably beat the Chris and Claudio to the point the latter had to run all sorts of outside interference to stay competitive. It wasn't until reDRagon that the Briscoes finally met their match as a tag team, although as individuals Mark and Jay are much more fallible.

This is one of the main criticisms that John Cena receives, on multiple levels: He's been pushed so heavily for so long that he almost never loses, and any loss is always accompanied by a mitigating factor (e.g.: outside interference, his opponent cheating, Cena tripped and fell, being screwed over by a crooked referee or heel authority figure, a tag team partner betraying him, etc.) Furthermore, Cena simply does not care about any losses he incurs, always laughing them off, treating them as a fluke or simply showing up the next night with no injuries whatsoever. The intention was probably to promote good sportsmanship, but when you don't have consequences that characters actually care about then it sucks all the drama from the room. In the ring itself, he's infamous for having four to five Heroic Second Winds per match at uneven intervals.

Austin Aries in TNA, specifically in their X-Division, so much so that "Option C" (anyone with the X Division belt can trade it in for a shot at the World Heavyweight Title) was created just to get the belt off Austin Aries, and even then, Aries himself created Option C, and it was heavily implied that he did so on the assumption he could always win back the X Division Title.

In sports, whenever a season gets utterly dominated by an unstoppable favorite, particularly if even other strong contestants can't keep up with them. At time fans can still like it, particularly a Flashy Invincible Hero (the NBA Finals' audience records were when Michael Jordan was trampling everyone). Other times, they'll just get bored (Michael Schumacher winning five straight Formula One championships, with barely any competition most years), or outright mixed reception (The modern day New England Patriots with Bill Belichick and Tom Brady).

Some codices don't take the Invincible Hero approach. Codex: Eldar shows that while they still have much strength in them, they are quite clearly sliding towards inevitable destruction. Codex: Dark Eldar is the same: the Dark Eldar are doomed.

The Ork logic goes something along these lines: "Orkz are never beaten in combat, if we win we win, if we die, we die fighting so that doesn't count and if we run away it's OK because we're always back for anuvver go".

Tyranids avert this painfully, being the only army whose own rulebook goes into vast description about all the times the Tyranids lose. (Granted, nearly every single one of these cases serves as textbook examples of Pyrrhic Victory.) The logic is supposedly "if they won, you wouldn't be hearing about it." As the Tyranids measure it their invasion so far has been a reconnaissance mission before the bulk of their forces arrive.

This is criticism that is very often leveled against Exalted, as the eponymous Exalted themselves are always portrayed by the system as completely indestructible übermensch that can outplan Batman, outdrink Tony Stark, outfight everyone and survive any attack. The cunning player and GM will find many, many weaknesses that can be exploited in order to make their lives miserable, no least the crippling flaw all Exalted must choose.

The Challenge Rating system introduced in 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons was specifically weighted to select opponents that the player characters had a fairly good chance of demolishing, as the expectation was that they'd tackle about four fights in a row before they'd get to replenish resources. That didn't stop game masters from siccing an occasional above-CR opponent on the heroes to keep them from getting cocky, but one who stuck strictly to equal-CR encounters and allowed too many rest-and-recharge breaks could easily turn their campaigns into this trope.

The series spoofs this as characters are well aware that this trope is one of the privileges of the Main Character/Hero and will try to steal the spot when they can. However, in the actual storylines, the main character usually has his ass completely handed to him by a character a thousand levels higher at least once.

Valkyria Chronicles: Welkin is never wrong about anything, ever (even if he's being loopy about it), and because losing him constitutes a game over in every mission, he never retreats or dies. He's also usually in the Edelweiss, which is expensive to activate and has very limited movement, and so for many missions it's easier and more efficient to have him sit pretty in the tank and have your squad do the dirty work.

Grotesque Tactics — both the first and second game — is generally an RPG parody, and plays with tropes all the time, but nothing as much as Holy Avatar — he is the proverbial knight in shining armor, with cool shades and three maidens all fawning over him, and he has been everywhere, done everything. Adding to this trope is one of his special attacks, which is a one-hit-kill for weaker enemies, actually stating so in the description of the skill!

Some in the Touhou fandom depict Reimu Hakurei as this, an unstoppable force not unlike a Determinator but with much less motivation required. Storyline-wise this is somewhat accurate; the main purpose of the spellcard system is to let anyone have a fair go at Reimu while ruling out the possibility of accidentally killing her, as her existence is necessary for the setting's continued existence. On the other hand, she has lost a number of fights in the multiplayer games' story modes and was outright stomped by Watatsuki no Yorihime, who herself is a clearer example, capable of defeating Sakuya Izayoi, Remilia Scarlet, Marisa Kirisame and Reimu herself, all of them considered some of the strongest players in Gensokyo, in succession. It is later revealed that she actively defies this in Imperishable Night: her last word, Fantasy Heaven, has her fly away from reality and it is said that the only reason it doesn't make her unstoppable is due to a self-imposed time limit. For reasons only known to herself, she tries to limit the use of this ability to the absolute minimum, even if it could theoretically solve many of her problems (like the above Watatsuki no Yorihime.)

Though averted in gameplay, Fridge Logic turns Altaïr Ibn La-Ahad of Assassin's Creed I into this. The game's Framing Device has Desmond using the Animus to relive Altaïr's life through ancestral memory, and the health bar is represented as "sync". If the player does something that the "real" Altaïr never did, like killing an innocent, Desmond loses sync with Altaïr's memories, and instead of death, Desmond is fully desynchronized from the Animus and must re-enter. You also lose sync if Altaïr takes any damage in a fight. Which means the "real" Altaïr never had an enemy land a hit on him.

Undertale: Although the player character can die, you can always reload a save and try again. What makes this count is that this is a major plot point In-Universe: characters such as Sans and Flowey are well aware of this ability and both comment on how many times you've died facing them, and the latter is even better at this than you are, since not only can he screw around with your own save file, but abuse a save-state function that you can't even use. Of course, this only counts if you're doing the Neutral or Pacifist Runs: if you're doing the Genocide Run, Frisk becomes an Invincible Villain.

The HoonDing is the Yokudan (Precursors of the Redguards) spirit of perseverance over infidels and the "Make Way" god. The HoonDing has historically manifested whenever it is needed to "make way" for the Yokudan/Redguard people. It usually manifests as a weapon that can destroy any enemy, but it can also manifest itself using mortal avatars. According to some interpretations, these avatars aren't necessarily the HoonDing itself, but the HoonDing taking over and/or working through the avatar. The key feature of the HoonDing is that no matter what, nothing will stop it from making way.

Sonic the Hedgehog has been accused of becoming one in later installments of the franchise. No matter how daunting a task may be, he usually ends up solving it with little to no issue and at worst will just get beaten down by the villains for a while before recovering and coming out on top regardless. This is most evident in Sonic Forces where, despite being locked up and torturednote The torture line was added in the English script, which is why he doesn't show any signs of it. for a six months and Eggman taking over most of the world, Sonic shows no signs of being worse for wear from it and ends up turning the whole situation around in the span of a few hours. The Archie Comic made it the most apparent after it's short lived Continuity Reboot, where one of the mandates SEGA inforced on it was that Sonic could only ever face a temporary setback that must be undone in the span of that issue.

In Turnabout Storm, Twilight remarks how suspicious it is that the murder victim had a flawless winning record (it turns out he blackmailed every competitor who posed a threat), and Phoenix agrees. The joke is that Phoenix had a perfect record of his own until he took Matt Engarde's case, and that the games make a big deal out of most of the prosecutors having perfect win records (until they come up against Phoenix, of course).

Web Comics

The duo of protagonists from Skullkickers certainly qualify. They don't seem to take as much as a scratch in any fight, both are nigh invulnerable and beat any odds with ease. They also come equipped with a handgun in a medieval setting — for the short while they lost this edge, a Deus ex Machina reunited the characters with their lost gear almost immediately.

Rocky from Pokémon-X has fainted a grand total of twice, and this was so notable that it was actually pointed out when it happened that it was the first time it had ever happened. 596 pages into the comic. This also lead to Brendan's first ever defeat in the comic — but he's an Idiot Hero, so we tend to overlook his invincibility. (What's more, the second time Rocky fainted, Brendan technically tied.)

In the dozen plus years Sluggy Freelance has been around, there have only been a handful of characters who aren't horribly outclassed when facing Bun-Bun, and only three who have ever actually beaten him in one-on-one combat: Aylee's evil clone, Blacksoul (who is actually Bun-Bun from the future), and Oasis (who had to suddenly unveilpyrokinetic abilities to pull that off). Bun-Bun only barely qualifies as a hero. An alternative view is that Bun-Bun works as a way to establish an enemy as 'top tier', and the rarity of beating him is so it keeps its credibility and doesn't suffer from The Worf Effect.

The Goblins B-comic Tempts Fate has the hero perform based on the amount of donations the readers send in. Needless to say, Tempts Fate wins every battle with extreme ease, and the readers can feel the accomplishment of having helped along this overwhelming victory.

Interestingly, for all of a God-Mode SueAuthor Avatar that he is, Comic Chris of Sonichu subverts this greatly, mostly in his earlier stories. Most of his battles seem to have him on the ropes, ending up rescued by someone else before he turns the tables on his opponents. He doesn't get into Invincible Hero territory until his last (published) issue, where he systematically destroys his opponents with ease. That being said, Sonichu himself would most often defeat all of his opponents, sometimes with lethal force, without breaking a sweat. It comes from a combination of the author's belief that his characters are real, not wanting to make his characters work hard to achieve their goals, and most of the Sonichu stories being his way of venting his frustration at some obstacle in his life.

The Sisterhood in Sinfest. They repeatedly raid the Devil's facilities and get away with it effortlessly and without retaliation.

Rai from Noblesse is perhaps the strongest character character in the whole Noblesse-verse, only matched by the Lord. But the more he uses his powers, the more he uses up his life force, and by the time I'm writing this, he is already beyond recovery.

Saitama of One-Punch Man is a Deconstructed Character Archetype. He is absolutely invincible to absolutely everything, and the ability to defeat anything with one punch sets him as the most powerful hero. As a result, he no longer finds any excitement in villain fights, and hopes for an opponent who can challenge him.

Wapsi Square features many former supervillains (teenage angst and forced Mad Science murder rituals don't mix) who have immortality, and the two main characters get upgraded to this after saving the world for the first time (Actually, they were bred to be immortal, but didn't realize it until after one of the few things that could kill them was obliterated). The implication is that the story is shifting to two newly introduced characters, Astali and Castella (The fact that Astali grows Gag Boobs just like the main character is great evidence for this).

Web Original

Whateley Universe: There has been discussion on the Whateley forum boards to the effect that Team Kimba as a whole may be turning into this, though; they're uncommonly powerful for a group of freshmen (and that power has only grown considerably since their introduction about a single in-universe semester ago with no sign of slowing down yet), have so far suffered only temporary setbacks at worst, and their adversaries keep underestimating them to the point where the suspension of disbelief starts to show stretch marks. They survived their one real loss ('Birthday Brawl') intact, with the purpose of the story being to replace the "Cardboard Prison" and "Offscreen Villain Dark Matter" tropes with onscreen events that serve the same narrative purpose.

In the GameFAQs Character Battles, Linkalways wins. While the other characters have seen their strength fluctuate over the years, Link started as a God tier character, and just kept on climbing. He was removed from the main bracket in 2005 to give other characters a chance to win. Due to a Retool changing the format to four way free-for-alls, Link returned to the main bracket in 2007, but by then, not even the rest of the Noble Nine (the nine characters considered to be the strongest) could touch him, never mind any other poor sod unlucky enough to get in his way. Humorously, the one time Link was defeated in the Character Battles, it was by the TetrisL-Block. It was plainly obvious that this only happened because the GameFAQs userbase was simply sick of Link winning every year without fail. And then DRAAAAAVEN, using general popularity of League of Legends, stole Link's victory a second time.

Max Landis's video short "Wrestling Isn't Wrestling" characterizes John Cena as this, portraying all of his matches as effortless victories in which he instantly dispatches his opponent with a vapid smile and then shrugs.

Bugs Bunny has spent the whole of his career as a Karmic Trickster effortlessly outwitting and humiliating B-listers and icons alike in the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies pantheon, such as Beaky Buzzard and Daffy Duck respectively. So untouchable is Bugs, that of the many adversaries he faced over the roughly 172 cartoons he originally starred in, the number of characters able to best the trickster rabbit can be counted on one hand. Some villains, such as Yosemite Sam and Marvin the Martian, were created to give Bugs a more formidable and less sympathetic opponent.

Speedy Gonzales's Super Speed made him near untouchable by antagonists such as Sylvester (the odd occasion the cat actually placed the mouse in his mouth he often merely charged with enough power to rip (harmlessly) through his tail, suggesting it was actually physically impossible for Sylvester to eat Speedy).

Captain Planet and the Planeteers. The show becomes somewhat better since the Planeteers are the main stars, but the Cap himself often feels more like some sort of Deus ex Machina who can just fix anything. Some episodes have him immobilized by pollution (or hate), forcing the Planeteers to help him, but usually he's just called within the last five minutes to easily defeat the villain and magically repair whatever damage has been done. He's made slightly more interesting whenever he is forced to fight his evil twin, and gets his ass handed to him.

Ōban Star-Racers averts this so much it can be considered an inversion: the Earth team seems to get by winning as few races as possible. At least one time their continuation hinged on a match they weren't even in.

The Silver Skeeter in Doug's comic book episodes: He's made of liquid metal (thus Nigh Invulnerable) and can fly through space on his skateboard, which is extreme compared with Quail Man's intellectual "powers of the Quail." Doug, frustrated that Skeeter's God-Mode Sue is taking over his story, calls Skeeter out with this trope.

The 1967 Hanna-Barbera series Shazzan featured an all-powerful Genie as its title character; the writers professed difficulty with the series, because Shazzan was so powerful that they couldn't think up any difficulties for him to face. In one episode, Nancy was trapped in The Underworld and Shazzan couldn't just teleport her back. In another, the kids were trapped behind a forcefield that Shazzan couldn't affect. That was about it. Chuck and Nancy need to put their rings together and say "Shazzan" for him to appear so most of the conflicts involved them being separated or the rings being stolen.

Superman: The Animated Series shows that The Joker feels this way about Batman even compared to Superman. He swings by Metropolis and casually offers to kill Superman for Lex Luthor in exchange for a million dollars, and when Lex points out that he can't take down a "mere mortal" like Batman, Joker snaps:

The Joker: THERE'S NOTHING "MERE" ABOUT THAT MORTAL!!!

Lampshaded — or should it be Mirrored Disco Balled? — in Batman: The Brave and the Bold with the Ear Worm "Drives Us Bats", in which the Music Meister — and eventually the DC Universe — expresses hilariously the frustrations of dealing with the omnipotent god-dammed Batman.

In Tom and Jerry, Tom occasionally got a victory over Jerry (especially in later shorts), often when the mouse started their Escalating War without provocation. Add to that as often as Jerry won, he was still vulnerable to Amusing Injuries, albeit not nearly as often as Tom. Jerry's Invincible Hero status is partially owed to "Weird Al" Effect. There are a deceptively large amount of shorts where Jerry wasn't the clear victor (either due to Tom getting the last laugh, or the two falling into a stalemate where neither was better off). Even in the instances Jerry was victorious, the times he won handily were uncommon, with him often shown struggling against Tom, or taking nearly as much slapstick pain and humiliation as he did.

Averted in Hercules: The Animated Series. After the movie became a hit, the mouse house decided to make a weekday afternoon toon based on it. Except that by the end of the film, Herc is incredibly powerful and has handily defeated nearly every major threat mythological ancient Greece had to offer. The solution was to make the TV show an interquel taking place during Herc's high school years (a period skipped over entirely in the film) with Hercules always self-identifying as a "hero in training," and looking a tad scrawny compared to his adult self from the latter two-thirds of the movie.

A sort of in-universe example happens in one episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius when Jimmy is actually banned from the school Science Fair because everyone is sick of him winning year after year.

One episode played with this trope, as a villain used Brock's sheer invincibility in a Evil Plan.

The Mask. He's invincible due to deliberate cartoon physics as a given superpower. His only weakness is that his mask can be removed, but even then he can fool his adversaries with trick mask removals. That, and the common cold, apparently.

Cartman tries to act like one on South Park, in the "Good Times with Weapons" episode. Every time the other kids give their ninjas a power, Cartman immediately jumps in and declares that he has a better version of the same power.

Cartman: I am Bulrog and I have lots and lots of powers.

Kyle: No, asshole! From now on you only get to have one power! So what is it?!

Cartman: I have the power to have all the powers I want.

The ¡Mucha Lucha! episode "Doomien" has Rikochet and Buena Girl as a tag-team who always seems to win, to the point that no one is actually rooting for them in the tag-team matches.

The eponymous character of Kim Possible. The writers were very much aware of this, however, and included In-Universe arguments that sidekick Ron is a superior hero because he's fallible.

Mandy in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy claims that she "never loses." Over the course of the series, she seems to have backed up that claim pretty well. She's gone up against all sorts of things, and anything she couldn't take out on her own, she could with Billy's help. Every competition she enters, she takes the top spot. Several times, she becomes the Evil Overlord of the universe. It's no wonder she's a Deadpan Snarker — it's the only thing left that amuses her. She did lose to the Kids Next Door once, though. The Abominable Snowman gave her a run for her money as well, needing Grim taking advantage of a glacier to beat him.

Captain Implausible is a superhero on a show within the show. The whole premise of his show is he's impossible to beat.

That about sums up Phineas and Ferb's whole situation. When you have to build your own super-intelligent A.I. and program it to trap you repeatedly in order to have a little fun, and then you defeat it effortlessly, it's difficult to ever feel afraid for you. The only times Phineas and Ferb can't do something is usually when they simply decide that they can't. Accordingly, if there's any tension in Phineas and Ferb, it's usually emotional tension, such as Phineas being angry at Perry in The Movie.

Felix the Cat. In the comics, he always had some Applied Phlebotinum (magic beans, magic carpet, magic potion, magical gnome servants, etc.) on hand when he needed it. The 50s series condensed all these items into his signature magic bag, which can turn into or produceanything. (It also served as a convenient MacGuffin to get the bad guys after him.)

The title hero of Hanna-Barbera's The Atom Ant Show (1965-1968). In one episode only it was revealed (and subsequently forgotten) that he could be involuntarily distracted by the presence of a picnic.

The Dreamstone, while Rufus and Amberley waver inconsistently between this and an Invincible Incompetent, the Dream Maker and Wuts were almost completely unassailable, having insurmountable magic powers that could take out the Urpneys (and sometimes even Zordrak) with utter ease (Rufus and Amberley's competence usually depended how long they needed to pad out the story until the other more powerful heroes could quickly take care of everything). The Wuts suffered only a single case of The Worf Effect in "The Spidermobile".

This is the reason Yoda rarely got A Day in the Limelight on Star Wars: The Clone Wars: the writers had problems coming up with something that would challenge him. He directly fought the Separatists only once, and eventually starred in a Force-themed story.

Rick from Rick and Morty. For a certain definition of "hero". Even given the Sadist Show nature of the series, Rick is notable for his impressive win record against villains. He has gone up against galactic governments, alien scientists, impossibly vast and powerful extradimensional beings, and even the Devil himself, and he has outsmarted and defeated all of them. Even alternative versions of himself have been made fools of. Only a single episode so far has ended with Rick not coming out on top. It's not the Season 2 finale which sees him being arrested by the galactic government; he allowed himself to be captured so he could bring it down from the inside. And he does.He has, however, been bested by Evil Morty. He only escapes death because Morty saves him at the last second. The Season 3 finale is also another rare failure for Rick, as all has plans have fallen apart and Jerry is back with Beth, and the family are stronger than ever.

And these are just the example we've seen! Morty's Mind Blowers shows at least one minor example Rick cared enough to wipe from Morty, who knows what other petty losses he has had.

Though the titular stars of The Ripping Friends play this up to a degree for laughs by basically having them get off to pain, they do manage to get at least somewhat roughed up from time to time. The show REALLY has fun with the concept when Pooperman rolls up to the party, though. He's basically Superman (If the name wasn't enough of a clue) with even more ridiculous powers like shooting missiles from his legs and growing his fists to massive size to boost his already unstoppable strength, and he has absolutely no weaknesses at all. Thankfully he's a genuinely good guy (not even sinking to Smug Super levels)... at least until he's mind-controlled by evil sentient underpants.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy